Violinist Katherine Bormann contemplates whether you can be in a long-term relationship with a composition and talks about why she’ll stick with Strauss's Rosenkavalier Suite until the end.
Violinist Katherine Bormann contemplates whether you can be in a long-term relationship with a composition and talks about why she’ll stick with Strauss's Rosenkavalier Suite until the end.
Featured Music:
R. STRAUSS - Concert Suite: Der Rosenkavalier
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My name is Katherine Bormann. I’m a violinist in The Cleveland Orchestra. And the piece that I’ve chosen that is most meaningful to me is Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier Suite.
When you’re a musician, you don’t just play a piece and then never pick it up again. There are so many pieces that you revisit over time in different stages.
Well, the first time I knew anything about Rosenkavalier, it was in undergrad. And I was taking an orchestral excerpts class. We started with the Viennese waltz, the Wiener waltz, which is this slow section in the strings — it starts slow, and then it gets faster and faster over time, and more rapturous, and more instruments join in. But when you start, you have to get that rhythm of a Viennese waltz, where the second beat comes a little early and 1-2-3. It’s not just 1-2-3, 1-2-3; it’s 1-2-3, 1-2-3.
And of course, that’s not as accurate as Franz would be able to describe it, but it’s sort of this delicate thing and it has this glissando: da-ya-bah, ya-da-ta, ya-da-da. It’s supremely elegant. The teacher of this class was Raphael Fliegel, Mr. Ray Fliegel. He infused this music with slow, thoughtful meaning, and he made music that was really tough and incomprehensible to me at first, he made it take shape.
It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that what I really wanted to do was to be in an orchestra and I was thinking about this always in the background. What does one need to do to pursue that path? Because that’s really where I could see myself and the music that I enjoyed the most. So, after finishing grad school I moved to Miami Beach, Florida, to be a member of the New World Symphony. It was the last year of my fellowship and I did not have a job. And the financial crisis of 2008 had happened, of course, the year before. And so many orchestras canceled or postponed auditions. They stopped hiring; they had hiring freezes. Like now, arts organizations were really taking huge dips in their endowment. They were making alternative plans for the future. It was very precarious.
That December, this piece, the Rosenkavalier, was on this program. And I remember one of the concerts that we played, I was just feeling like I had maybe failed before it had all begun. I had this horrible sense that my parents, who were so generous, supported me through my education, and my teachers, who were all so encouraging, and everybody was supporting me and yet I had no idea if I was good enough to win a job, if I would even get the chance to take another audition.
There’s this great theme in Rosenkavalier. It’s sort of the farewell theme, with the Marschallin is bidding goodbye to Octavian and wishing this young man and his new love well. And it’s this most achingly tender, passionate music, and it’s so heartbreakingly beautiful. And again, the whole orchestra’s coming together in this kind of rapture, but there’s something extremely sad behind all this passion. I was just in tears while I was playing this in the orchestra, because I was feeling so raw and uncertain.
Every time I hear that line — da-da-da, da-da-da-da — and it just keeps building and building, I can feel the ache, the tightness in my chest that I felt. You’re trying to not lose it in front of anybody else. I could feel like I wanted to play every single note with every single inch of my bow, and just to not take one moment for granted, because what if that was it? What if that was the last time?
I’ve been in The Cleveland Orchestra now for nine years — which is crazy that the time has gone that fast. I never in my life thought something that wonderful could happen. And I’m grateful for it every single day.
In the fall we got to play Rosenkavalier for our audiences here at the Gala and then we performed at Carnegie Hall. I harken back to that time where I was learning this piece and the wonderful teachers I had along the way, the wonderful conductors, the friends that we were all playing this piece together. But then to get to play this piece as a member of The Cleveland Orchestra with Franz conducting. It’s a very special connection to play pieces like Strauss with Franz because he has that knowledge, that deep, deep knowledge of Vienna — Viennese culture, the Viennese style.
Franz speaks a lot about sound quality, purity in the sound, or energy, or what exact sound color. He talked a lot about the silver bells, the silver rose, sort of a silvery, shimmery sound in those really soft, sweet colors. We spent a lot of time, I remember, working on those specifically.
A piece like this, again, it’s like you put down layers. You could almost look at this piece geologically and see the strata of your experience. Where you were at each time in your life or each layer of that piece. I can’t really adequately express what it feels like, the joy to play onstage with these friends in this orchestra.
People go to great lengths for art, because that’s where the meaning is. I believe that’s what we all are meant to do. I believe humans are meant to create and to think and to design and to share these sorts of things, and that that is where the deepest joy resides. It doesn’t have to be in a professional capacity, but that we all have something that we’re nurturing in ourselves that’s creative, that is something of beauty, that is something of meaning, and that we do it for ourselves, which is wonderful, but that we also do it to share with others. And I really think that’s the point of the arts, and hopefully the point of what societies can be is to bring more of that into our daily life.